“But he speaks his mind!” shout the Trumpkins. Indeed, he does, in a practically stream-of-consciousness fashion: His announcement speech was like Finnegans Wake as reimagined by an unlettered person with a short attention span. The value of speaking one’s mind depends heavily on the mind in question, and Trump’s is second-rate.
That is more interesting than just about everyone’s announcment speech this side of Lincoln Chafee. It is worth noting that while some compare his speech to James Joyce, others compare it (or at least a couple lines in it) to… Adolf Hitler.

Ben Carson apparently leads in the polls (or at least one poll). This may be credited to two things: one — fallout from South Carolina, and two — there’s more than a dozen candidates and he’s at 11 percent.

In more relevant policy news… he dips and darts at the Deptartment [sic] of Education and offers this conservative position…Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson says that part of his plan for education would be to have the Department of Education monitor colleges and universities for “political bias” and withhold funding from them if it exists.“I think the Department of Education should monitor institutions of higher education for political bias and withhold federal funding if it exists,” Carson told Las Vegas radio host Heidi Harris on Thursday.
Never go wrong charging against Marxist Professors.

In response to a reprimand from the Federal Election Commission, “Carly for America,” a super PAC launched in February to support the presidential candidacy of Carly Fiorina, has changed its name to “CARLY for America.” The organization had fallen on the wrong side of a federal regulation prohibiting super PACs from using a candidate’s name and opted to, uh, fix the problem by replacing Fiorina’s first name with an acronym that also happens to be Fiorina’s first name.

“There can be no doubt that the shooting on Wednesday night was racially motivated and signals to all of us that the scars of our history are still with us today,” Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement Saturday. “Throughout our country, we still have much to do in the name of equality. I want to talk about those issues on the campaign trail.”

“Go back and look at the covers of Time and Newsweek from the early ’70s. And we were told that if we didn’t do something by 1980, we’d be popsicles. Now we’re told that we’re all burning up. Science is not as settled on that as it is on some things.”

We started this week with what’s in effect a joke of a story: the White head of the NAACP in Spokane. For some reason I’m thinking of the “White Rastafarians” in the movie “10 Things I Hate About You”… (a silly but entertaining movie) — though, there’s any number of things you can jump to to fill in the joke…

Mid-way through the week we have a tragedy in South Carolina. A 21 year old White Supremacist (why not call it terrorism?) — or some dolt kid susceptible to some messages of hate — killed a slew of people in a black church.

The one random thought I have is… the guy really really really would hate the NAACP head in Spokane.

Jones was invited by ABC News to appear on This Week this past Sunday to discuss Jade Helm; he never showed. He accused the new organization of dirty tricks, like slow car service, that torpedoed his appearance, a claim the ABC News said is patently false. In fact, Mediate reported that the car for Jones was outside his apartment an hour ahead of schedule–Jones did not answer their phone calls or knock on his door by building security.

One cause they never fail to mention — the Media Matters, the Rachel Maddows, and the so forths, on this part of Rand Paul’s career is the fight against the Bilderbergers. Put in his mouth here…

We await to see if this line of questioning sways the John Birch Society, or if maybe it’s not necessarily hypocritical to attack those that attack Rand Paul on the Bilderberg matter while fingering the Bilderbergs as enshrining Rand Paul as something of a double agent.

Yes, voters are dumb, corruptible, gullible and selfish, and many candidates are immoral and opportunistic. It is possible to fool most of the people for much of the time. And it is true that the world’s most pressing problems cannot be solved by unaided democracy, because turkeys do not vote for Thanksgiving.

I understand it as the concept that… oh, people will vote for ice cream and won’t vote for broccoli. … they’ll vote for what they want; not what they need… fair enough and true enough.

But this seems to have the air of the Oligarchy telling turkeys that they need Thanksgiving, which… they don’t. Maybe the Oligarchs need Thanksgiving, and need turkeys to vote for it, but the turkeys should be voting against it.

Well. That’s the Wall Street Journal for you… even when taking the sensible editorial policy that China’s government is not one to emulate they botch it and highlight the problem with our governance, or the governance they advocate.

Well la de freaking da. The Burlington “alt weeky” has compiled the Bernie Sanders material for all to see — and they’re worth a read to see the route taken by one of the more interesting politicians in this country —

His eyebrows lifted when a reporter informed him that a candidate for president of the United States used to live in the building. Lopez said he’s never heard of Bernie Sanders, who declined to be interviewed for this story.

In 1982, Reagan defunded and abolished the U.S. Metric Board, which was supposed to spearhead conversion. That signaled the beginning of the end for metric conversion, even though Reagan six years later signed an omnibus law that, tucked deep inside, contained a measure stipulating the metric system “be used, to the extent economically feasible, in Federal agency’s’ procurements, grants, and other business-related activities.”

Jeb Bush is in Europe. Because Europe loves that family! We’re also getting that familiar “fictional bad guy” more popular than “politico” — a rubric I never understand because… ask the question about a fictional bad guy and I’m always thinking of how s/he sticks up in the fictional universe and … oh, works dramatically.

For some reason, every time an injustice unfolds on the Internet, the offended party announces what year it is—as though the wrongdoers are time travellers from a bygone era who will learn the error of their ways the moment they learn the date.

The phrase “this is [the year or decade we are living in]” has always struck me as ahistorical, like all vestiges of a previous time have been eradicated, we are now more enlightened permanently.
The one good thing about it is it is the act of saying it, laying it into various media, makes it apt to become dated. It becomes comical in the way that you hear “It’s the 80s” in a Karate Kid.

So … she’s right. I don’t know that she’s right for the reason I think, but it’s a phrase that should be banished as becoming meaningless. The year is 2015, and something called “stuff” still exists as it did in the 1950s, as it did in the 1830s, as it did in the Hellenistic Period, codified and uncodified, superficial and intrinsic, and on and on.